Lawyer: Brown never charged with serious felony

By ALAN SCHER ZAGIER3 hours ago

.

View gallery

.

CLAYTON, Mo. (AP) — The 18-year-old fatally shot by a suburban St. Louis police officer didn't face any juvenile charges at the time of his death and never was charged with a serious felony such as murder, robbery or burglary, a juvenile court system lawyer said Wednesday.

Those details emerged at a hearing in which two media organizations sought the release of any possible juvenile records for Michael Brown. An attorney for the Brown family called the effort to get the records "shameful" and motivated by "character assassination."

Cynthia Harcourt, the St. Louis County juvenile office's attorney, offered the most specific public details on whether Brown faced legal trouble before his 18th birthday — a subject of intense speculation in a case that has garnered global attention. The 45-minute hearing before a St. Louis County family court judge didn't reveal whether Brown had ever been charged with lesser offenses as a juvenile.

Juvenile records are confidential in Missouri, but under state law, being charged with certain violent crimes removes those juvenile privacy protections. Police have said Brown had no adult criminal record.

Joe Martineau, an attorney for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, cited an overriding public right to know Brown's history after his early August shooting death by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson sparked more than a week of sometimes-violent protests and drew international scrutiny.

"There is interest in knowing Michael Brown's background," Martineau said. "What we're asking for here is just verification, one way or the other ... We're acting in a vacuum here."

"The court of public opinion does not require the release of juvenile records," she said.

Brown family attorney Anthony Gray said that even if Brown did have a brush with the juvenile court system — including for such low-level offenses as truancy — those details are irrelevant to the question of whether Wilson acted with excessive force.

"I don't know what would be the relevance of that ... after this young man was executed in broad daylight," said Gray, who attended the hearing but did not speak in court.

The civil lawsuit by Charles C. Johnson of Fresno, California, cites a 1984 Missouri Court of Appeals ruling that allowed the release of the juvenile records of an 18-year-old who was killed by a security guard while shoplifting at a supermarket in 1979.

That man's mother challenged a trial court's decision to release the records to defendants who were hoping to determine the 18-year-old's lost earning capacity.

Johnson is editor-in-chief of the website GotNews.com. He also attended the hearing.

Judge Ellen Levy Siwack did not indicate how long she would take before releasing a ruling.

Also on Wednesday, a grand jury was scheduled to meet for the third time since Brown's death to consider evidence in a possible criminal case. The U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division also is investigating the police shooting.

Some media members want access to any juvie files he may or may not
have? The dead victim's juvenile history is on trial but not the
killer's? Anything to attempt to smear this kid as a violent 'big Black
brute'?

AP source: US to investigate Ferguson police

By ERIC TUCKER40 minutes ago

.

View gallery

.

.

.

.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department plans to open a
wide-ranging investigation into the practices of the Ferguson Police
Department following the shooting last month of an unarmed black
18-year-old by a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb, a person
briefed on the matter said Wednesday night.

The person said the investigation could be
announced as early as Thursday afternoon. Missouri officials were
notified Wednesday of the investigation.

The investigation will
look at the overall practices of the police department, including
patterns of stops, arrests and use-of-force, as well as the training the
officers receive, the person said.

The inquiry is separate from
an ongoing civil rights investigation the Justice Department is
conducting into the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Officer
Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. A local grand jury is also investigating the
shooting, which set off nearly two weeks of unrest in Ferguson and
became a flashpoint in the national discussion of police treatment of
minorities across the country. Attorney General Eric Holder two weeks
ago visited the St. Louis suburb, where he sought to reassure residents
about the Justice Department investigation and shared personal
experiences of having himself been mistreated by the police.

The
person spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation, first
reported by The Washington Post, had not yet been announced.

Police is riot gear work to disperse a crowd of protesters Monday, Aug. 18, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo. T …

Police have said the shooting followed a scuffle that broke out
after Wilson told Brown and a friend to move out of the street and onto
a sidewalk. Police say Wilson was pushed into his squad car and
physically assaulted. Some witnesses have reported seeing Brown's arms
up in the air before the shooting in an act of surrender. An autopsy
paid for by Brown's family concluded that he was shot six times, twice
in the head.

The Justice Department's civil rights division
routinely investigates individual police departments when there are
allegations of systemic abuse or other problems. The department says
it's opened more than twice as many investigations into police
department in the past five years as were opened in the previous five
years. Among those that have recently come under investigation are the
Albuquerque, New Mexico, department, which was the subject of a harshly
critical report in April that faulted the police for a pattern of
excessive force and called an overhaul of its internal affairs unit.

Normally,
the federal investigation seeks to encourage significant changes to
policies and practices. The investigations sometimes end in an agreement
known as a consent decree, in which the police department agrees to
make changes.

I hope that everything Shaun King is saying is true and not republican postering to offset black support from the democrats (not specifically because the democrats are doing anything but if blacks are to be involved politically to make change, dems are the default)

if Shaun King is right, then thanks and watch yourself and keep the truth coming

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot create polls in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forum